“As every year, the school is closed for 3 months during the summer, the reason for this I guess is the hot temperatures of Cyprus(up to 45 degrees). In order to avoid for the boys not get bored and also get some extracurricular activity during summer, Marine, a French colleague, and I started to create a Garden Group named “Grow your own Food”. According to the arrangement with the Management team, we planned to grow up flowers and vegetables. We bought tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, sunflowers seeds and much more plants. But before we started gardening, we decided to offer to the minors some basic knowledge about gardening. After approximately an hour of intense research, we started to create a PowerPoint presentation. For our research, we used Wikipedia.com, WikiHow.com and finegardening.com. Our intention was to present the information in an easy but also interesting and illustrative way.
But we had another Goal, we did not want just to give them explanations and information how to grow their own food. We also wanted to motivate them, to show them that gardening is not only something a relaxing activity but also a kind of art.
So we also showed them some pictures of examples how one can decorate the garden. We wanted the boys to enjoy what they are doing, to get interested in it and maybe (just for some of them) see it as a new hobby.
So we started our workshop and the boys were really interested in the activity, unfortunately, the temperatures were too hot to work for a longer time in the garden so day by day the boys were less interested in the workshop and our summer extracurricular activity ended only after 1,5 month.
But all in all, it was a very nice experience and made me happy to see the boys so interested in a new activity. I hope next year someone else will be passionate about gardening to propose something similar.:)
